This was a good book, full of adventure and mystery. The ending alone was a bit disappointing, just because of the way it was written: at the end, a guy enters where the mysterious villain is and shoots him dead, and then he tells his story, in one long monologue. That’s it. For such a book sull of adventure, this was the most boring part of it all.
Also I did not understand the bit about Maitland and the baby, and how Dick got to the truth. I’ll explain at the end.
This is set in England, mostly in London. Dick Gordon is a policeman, and he works with Elk to solve the mystry of the Frogs, a group that started out quiet and sort of innocuous, but that lately was getting really serious. They’re called that way because the boss calls himself the Frog, and nobody knowshim, he’s always masked when someone sees him.
Elk and Gordon work together the whole book. Elk is not secluded away in the Records office, he is actively on the field.
Dick meets by chance Ella Bennett and falls in love. She has a brother, Ray, who dreams of big money, and a father, John, who goes often away, has a mysterious job that he hates, and takes pictures as a hobby, hoping to make money out of it. Moving pictures too.
Dick visits Ray at work, he’s a clerk at Maitland’s company. Ray introduces him to his friend and fellow clerk Philo Johnson.
Elk meets Joshua Broad, who is selling stuff by the road. He is suspicious, and right enough it turns out that this man, this American, is actually a rich man who s interested in finding the Frog. He follows all their investigation, but also conducts his own.
He was the most interesting character, until the boring ending.
Ray meets Lola and her husband Brady, only Ray thinks she’s single, and that Brady is a friend or associate of some kind. When Ella speaks of some well-paying job, he doesn’t ask too many questions. He doesn’t know he’s a frog until much much later. Still, as Ella mentions once, would it really be better if he was really giving information to a foreign country?
Ray loves money though, and he starts spending it. He has a nice flat, nice clothes, and spends a lot of time with Lola at a club, and he drinks a lot. He even punches his father while drunk. He only writes to his sister from time to time.
When Gordon comes to tell him about his being a Frog, he doesn’t believe him. It will be Lola herself, later, to make him understand who he works for. Still, he stays, and follows directions. The Frog sent orders for him and Brady. They grow a beard and dress like tramps, then go wherever he told them to go, they did whatever they were told, with this result: Ray was drugged and couldn’t remember much of the niht. Brady was killed, and thgun put in Ray’s hand. Since they were pretending to be two different people, our cops were not alerted, nobody really cared. Ray doesn’t defend himself because he doesn’t remember, but he knows that for a moment he hated Brady and wanted to kill him (Brady was ordered to tell him that he’s Lola’s husband), so he thinks he’s guilty and it’s better if nobody knows his real name, for his sister and father. He is given the death penalty.
Johnson is 50, Gordon is 31, that’s probably part of the reason why Ella chose Dick… well, Gordon was also the only one really trying. They both liked her, but Gordon went further, and eventually asked her to promise to marry him, whatever might happen. She agreed. Who knows if this promise had any weight in her decision afterwards: the Frog came to her house, to tell her that she must marry him, because he’s the only one that can save his brother, now in prison. She doesn’t really believe it, she tells him no, but then she’s so afraid that she goes immediately to Gordon, to ask about it. neither Gordon or Elk know about it, but Elk investigates further, and realises that the man they thought was Carter, the tramp who killed another tramp, was actually Ray Bennett, and at this point they don’t know what to do, and choose not to tell Ella, but then Lola comes revealing it all, feeling quite guilty for her part in Ray’s fate, so Ella learns all. Now comes the first bit of good luck, because that’s the most important thing, in life as in stories: that night, there was a man nearby. John Bennett ought to take pictures of animals, but he fell asleep. Somehow his camera kept going, or he activated it by mistake, whatever it was, the point is that Gordon and Elk could see that a third man killed Brady, that Ray is innocent.
Of course Gordon now starts a big race against time: it’s only a day before the execution, and he goes back and forth trying to find someone that can sign a reprieve to stop the execution. He manages that, but of course the Frog thought of everything, and all lines are down towards the prison. They tried calling, but nothing. No phone calls, no telegrams. So Gordon goes there perssonally, but some Frogs stop him on the way, and capture him. They can’t take the document because Gordon made a copy and hid the original.
Gordon manages to free himself and reach the prison in a car, and for a moment he thinks he was too late, but of course he wasn’t. Well, he would have been had everything gone according to plan, but there was something nobody expected: John Bennett was the executioner, that was the job he loathed so much, and when he realised who it was, of course he couldn’t do it, he stopped the whole thing and locked himself somewheere with Ray, giving Gordon a bit of much needed time.
The Frog doesn’t give up, though, and kidnaps Ella from her home, takes her away. It’s : “you’ll marry me or we’ll both die tonight”, which seems a bit too much, all of a sudden. Ella knows that he’s serious, he’s killed lots of people, sometimes directly and other times through his men. He put together a really big group, made primarily of tramps, but not only them. He also got a club manager, Hagn, who was a smart man, and most importantly he got Balder, who was one of Elk’s policemen. Actually, that’s how Elk caught him, because he wanted to show him a bit of kindness. He put his name up for promotion, and upon hearing that he got it, Elk looked up his address to go to his house and inform him in front of his wife and children…only to discover that the address he gave is just a front, he has a luxrious secret life. Balder was the great secret on how the Frogs could get everywhere, learn everything, get at anyone.
Anyway.
They all go crazy searching for her, but Broad is the first on the scene, having followed the Frog’s car with a bike.
From this moment on it’s all so silly. He confronts the Frog by knocking on his door (uisng Frog’s secret/not so secret anymore special knock…) and when Frog asks who it is, he says he’s Hagn, and hurry, open the door… and Frog does, he opens the door… And then Broad shoots him dead.
Gordon and the others arrive now, (really, they were a lot behind and now they’re just a few minutes after Broad? … ).
All that remains is to explain who is who and why Broad did it.
He was named Saul Morris, and he was a thief, not out of necessity but out of passion, he liked it. A plan got out of hand, he got hte money but got stuck in England, he couldn’t spend the French money, and the cops were looking for him, so he went to a man he had heard about, someone that could help. Harry Lyne agreed to help him, to send him half of the money once he was safely away. Harry decided to keep all that money to himself.
Broad had not seen his face well, but he could remember his tattoo perfectly, a frog on his left wrist. Knowing that Broad would look for him, Saul put a group together giving everyone that tattoo.
Then things got further, there were a lot of men that needed paying, so he started that big organization, he was the real boss at the Maitland firm, and got any opposition out of the way, so to speak.
Now it’s over, and Broad/Morris can go away. Gordon and Elk won’t look too closely at what happened to Frog’s money that was in the room…
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They say that Maitland was a poor, illiterate guy. He himself had told Ella that he had been in prison. Ok. So, he was illiterate, so all the books were for him, there was no child learning to write. Did he learn then? Or did he simply like to have children books? I thought they meant that he had children stuff because being illiterate he wanted/needed to learn at least something, like to read. And yet they say that even now he could not read anything, they showed him a simple line, “you are a fake” and he did not understand it. They told him it was an address and he believed it, so he couldn’t read even the easiest words, like You Are. So, why the children stuff?They planted the clothes and the toys, to confuse the cops, but Maitland was supposed to learn to write… you’re telling me that he learn to write but not to read???
Also, why did Maitland go to Ella? What could she do for him? Talk to Gordon, yes, maybe, but he never told her anything that she understood, and yet he kept coming… mah.
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